Reality in Movement: Octavio Paz as Essayist and Public Intellectual

In the last couple of decades there has been a surge of interest in Octavio Paz’s life and work, and a number of important books have been published on Paz. However, most of these books are of a biographical nature or they examine Paz’s role in the various intellectual initiatives he headed in Mexico, specifically the journals he founded.

Reality in Movement looks at a wide range of topics of interest in Paz’s career, including his engagement with the subversive, adversary strain in Western culture, his meditations on questions of cultural identity and intercultural contact, his dialogue with both leftist and conservative ideological traditions, his interest in feminism and psychoanalysis, as well as his theory of poetry, concluding with a chapter on Octavio Paz as a literary character-a kind of reception study. The book offers a complex and nuanced portrait of Paz as a writer and thinker, as well as an understanding of the era in which he lived.

Reality in Movement: Octavio Paz as Essayist and Public Intellectual will appeal to students of Octavio Paz, of Mexican literature more generally, as well as to readers with an interest in the many significant literary, cultural, political and historical topics Paz wrote about over the course of his long career.